I didn’t make it to CES in Vegas this year, but I sure read a bunch about it. Social media was a hot topic. A panel of experts spoke about the impact that diving into Twitter can have on businesses. This article covers that discussion. I found the part about Kodak using Twitter to conduct a vast focus group-like effort around naming a new product to be especially interesting. Sure sounds like it would be a lot cheaper and more timely than conducting real focus groups, doesn’t it?

Enterprises Tweet Their Way to Marketing Gold, Grief
Posted on itmanagement.earthweb.com
By Larry Barrett
January 7, 2010

LAS VEGAS — Social media has changed the way people look for jobs, share pictures of their kids and find new love interests, but thus far the vast majority of large companies still aren’t taking advantage of these sites and services to evangelize — and protect — their brands, according to a panel of social networking experts here at the Consumer Electronics Show.

For those companies willing to make the cultural commitment to the instantaneous praise and bashing served up 140 characters at a time on Twitter, the rewards can be considerable.

Jeffrey Hayzlett, Kodak’s chief marketing officer, said that he learned firsthand after the company originally debuted its Zi8 waterproof, pocket-sized HD video camera earlier this year. The critics loved the functionality — 1080p resolution, two-inch LCD screen, safe up to 10 feet in water — but hated the name.

Most companies would either ignore the panning or, perhaps, send the product back to the sales and marketing gurus to come up with a better name.

Kodak didn’t.

Instead, this summer it took the naming process to the people via Twitter, asking the great unwashed masses on the microblogging site to see if they could come up with something better. The winner, or winners as it turns out, were promised a free trip to Vegas for this year’s CES and will have their likeness displayed in some way on the product’s packaging.

From the thousands of tweets received from the crowdsourcing experiment, Kodak combined two fairly mundane suggestions — “Play” and “Sport” — to derive the new moniker “PlaySport.” It’s not rocket science but, according to Hayzlett, it’s a damn sight better than Zi8. [more ...]